Monday, August 6, 2018

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY "THE OC"

THE OC premiered on FOX fifteen years ago this week. The
show’s early August premiere grew out of necessity. You see FOX had a unique problem
in attempting to launch its Fall season: Major League Baseball.

The season traditionally starts in mid-September and, while
the other networks could run new episodes of their shows uninterrupted for
seven or eight weeks, FOX would find itself preempted for the ALCS, NLCS and
World Series on a somewhat random basis through October, and don’t get me
started on rain delays and rainouts. We could not get our schedule going until
November and then we were facing “sweeps” episodes and stunts on the other
networks. It was not pretty.

Fortunately for us AMERICAN IDOL came along in the summer of
2002 and settled into its January-May run. This made up for our horrendous Fall
performance. Still we were trying to figure out what to do in the Fall. We
decided to break the traditional development cycle so that some shows (dramas
to be exact) would be ready to come on in mid-August and get a six to eight
week uninterrupted run before the baseball preemptions kicked in.

We didn’t make a big deal of this. No grandiose
announcements at the Television Critics Tour that pilot season is dead…we
continued our regular development. We just went about the business of figuring
out how to get some shows on the air earlier than in the past.

If memory serves me we read a bunch of scripts and settled
on two (possibly three) dramas that we would put into early development so that
they could be screened before traditional pilot weeks. A few of us would screen
the pilots and order two of them straight to series. I don’t believe we tested
them before we made the decision. We went with our gut.

The two pilots that we ordered were THE OC and a quirky
series called WONDERFALLS which I personally liked a lot. We were all every
excited when we saw THE OC. It felt like we were back in BH 90201, PARTY OF
FIVE, MELROSE territory and it had several things going for it:

·It had the nerd/bad boy friendship dynamic at
its center

·There was the “shiksa goddess” component which
always pops

·You had the whole FRESH PRINCE/GREEN
ACRES/NORTHERN EXPOSURE fish out of water element

·There was a sad rich girl/bad boy sexual tension
thing

·The creator Josh Schwartz (really nice guy by
the way) injected a bit of a neurotic Jewish vibe into the proceedings which
eventually gave birth to Chrismukkah, second only to Festivus in terms of
holidays born from television.

What it didn’t have was diversity. After the show’s
successful summer launch that diversity issue led to a heated discussion
between my bosses and me over whether THE OC should follow the IDOL results
show in mid-season or should we give THE BERNIE MAC SHOW (which grew with the
IDOL lead-in) a second season in that prized slot. I lost that one and THE OC
moved to Wednesday in the 2003-04 season. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This
is the fifteenth anniversary and I want to talk about the premiere launch.

First, after ordering WONDERFALLS, with the producers
knowing full well our strategy for the early pick-up, we were informed that the
show would not be ready in the Fall. This was a typical ploy but non the less
discouraging. The show wound up being given a tough time slot in mid-season and
without the promotional push it would have received with the summer launch. WONDERFALLS
vanished after its original order. We’ll never know what might have been.

The good news was this allowed us to focus exclusively on
THE OC. As we started the campaign there was some concern that, by premiering
the show in early August, we were signaling to the audience that this was a
summer burn-off. In order to combat that perception, we made sure that the campaign
made it clear that this was a ”Fall” series. We came up with the slogan “The
best show of the fall begins this summer” or something close to that.

Little did we know that there was someone lurking at another
network who was intent on destroying THE OC…Jeff Zucker. Jeff was, at that time
the President of NBC Entertainment and sort of the Wile E. Coyote of this saga.
Jeff decided that he was going to take down THE OC by airing I believe an
original episode of FEAR FACTOR against the premiere. FEAR FACTOR was a success
for the Peacock and representative of the taste that Zucker was introducing to
the Must-See-TV culture.

When we saw what JZ was up to I suggested taking a page out
of cable and running THE OC three time a week – Tuesday original and repeats of
the episode on Friday and Monday. One of the benefits of launching THE OC in
the summer was the flexibility that it gave us in scheduling the show for maximum
effectiveness. It’s sort of how the AMERICAN IDOL results show came into being
the prior summer.

Back then in the summer of 2003 scheduling and
counter-programming mattered more than they do today so putting FEAR FACTOR against
the premiere of THE OC had the intended impact. It didn’t demolish the show
but, given the push, the ratings for the premiere were not what we had hoped
for.

I was in Hawaii with my family when THE OC premiered. Before
I left on vacation I promised my boss Gail Berman that I would get up early,
find a computer in the hotel, get the numbers and call her at about 4AM on
Kauai. I also told Mike Darnell our head of unscripted and my partner in crime
at FOX that I was going to be three hours earlier than LA time so PLEASE!!! don’t
call me when the ratings arrive. Mike and I talked ratings quite a lot
especially during IDOL season when we would be on the phone at 5:30 in the
morning talking overnights. Mike was an OC skeptic and thought we were out of
our minds to try to launch a scripted show in the middle of the summer.

Anyway, I called Gail from the lobby of the hotel and we
both agreed that there was nothing that we could do other than to hope that
this strategy of airing the show two additional times each week might off-set
Zucker’s dastardly deed.

After the call I crept back into my room where the Masked
wife kids were sleeping when my cell phone blasted out some reggae ringtone
waking the entire family. It was Mikey.

“So, what do you need me to give you for next week?”

“Mike it’s four in the morning, I’m in Hawaii, you just woke
my family. I told you not to call me when the numbers came in.”

“Oh yeah, sorry, but what do you need me to have ready for
next week?”

“Mike we’re not doing anything and my family is shooting me
daggers.”

It took me a few more minutes to end the conversation but
that was Mike and I honestly wouldn’t have had it any other way with him. We
accomplished a lot.

Back to Zucker. He felt that he had successfully destroyed
THE OC and, the following week, went back to repeats of some scripted show. Fortunately,
between that and the multiple repeats the second episode took a leap up in the
ratings. Zucker panicked and put a repeat FEAR FACTOR against episode three but
it was too late. THE OC had taken hold and I believe the ratings grew again and
the “buzz” was beginning . Zucker’s moves gave us a great growth story to go
along with the growing popular reception to the show.

THE OC was one of those rare shows where a plan actually
came together. Program Planning, Creative, Casting, Marketing and Scheduling
all with a little help from a clueless executive at another network contributed
to the success of a beloved albeit fairly short-lived series on FOX.